Linux in a Multivendor Environment

07/06/2000

In the first few articles in this series, I talked about strategies for
getting Linux into your organization and covered areas where it's
possible to work Linux in your enterprise as a stand-alone entity,
such as a network sniffer or as a web server. However, one of Linux's
strongest suits is as an "interoperability agent" that can allow a
company to support multiple platforms, such as Windows, Unix
systems, NetWare, and Apple Macintoshes painlessly from one central
server.

How does this happen?

Some background

One of the most interesting aspects of Linux development is that,
apart from the kernel itself, there has been no grand plan governing
the evolution of the overall system. In true open source fashion, the
various kinds of applications and non-kernel services available for
Linux have developed directly in response to the needs of the user
community. This is true in the *BSD world too, but Linux advocates
have raised it to an artform, as can be seen in the offerings
available at the open source software site Freshmeat.net or at the open source
collaborative development nexus, SourceForge.Net, both of which
are owned by VA Linux Systems.

A typical example: A developer somewhere in the world needs to have a data logging system that can monitor a collection
of serial ports but can't afford a commercial data acquisition system,
so he or she sits down and writes one.

Another development scenario is that a developer wants the same
capabilities as a commercial package on their Linux box, but the vendor
of the commercial package shows no interest in making a Linux port --
a common solution is to write a compatible package. GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation
Program) is a perfect example of such a package. The GIMP is a
Photoshop-compatible system which offers a wide variety of image
creation/manipulation facilities.

Lastly, another common occurrence is that packages, such as the
AppleTalk file-sharing package NetATalk which was originally
written for BSD-based Unix systems, are ported to Linux.

With all of the packages that have been ported from other Unixes and
the native Linux development that has gone on, Linux has an amazing
capability to interoperate with or translate to/from almost any other kind
of computer system and applications package currrently available
on any operating system platform.

A concrete example

How does this make a case for Linux in the enterprise? Say, for
example, you worked in an office where there were the following kinds
of computing systems used by various groups and divisions:

Some Windows 98 boxes using workgroup shares and sharing several printers

A small (but growing) collection of Linux workstations running StarOffice or Applix

Suppose the management of your firm gives you a chance to reduce the
server-count from four (NFS, NetWare, Macintosh, and
Windows for Workgroups) to one, single system that will transparently
take care of the needs of these diverse systems. How can this be done?

This is a realistic, but obviously contrived, scenario to demonstrate
how you could use a single Linux box to solve the file and printer
sharing for all of these systems.

If you were to put together a modest Linux system (a reasonably fast
PII/PIII system, or even a spare Sun or Compaq/DEC Alpha box) with a
generous allocation of memory (say, 192Mb) and enough disk space to
match the sum-total of the existing disk space on the existing servers,
you could set up this system in a day (not including copying all the
files from the other file servers and clueing the user community in on
the new service)!